Smart art

Photo Courtesy of Newhouse Center for Contemporary ArtJoseph Borelli's muscle-bound "Galdiators" are prissy featherweights carved out of pink foam. The blackand white drawings, Color Belongs to the Past" are by Tim Clifford.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — “Hope-a-Holic” at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art has drawings, video, paintings and sculpture — but looking at them is only the beginning. The question is: Will you get the joke, the point, the reason they are what they are?

Now, not everyone will get it and everyone who gets it might not love it. Still, this 22-artist show occupies a refreshing intersection, a cloverleaf where conceptual art, enthusiasm and satire collide in an explosion of cock-eyed good spirits

As Patrick Grenier, visual arts director and author of this smarty-pants showcase, characterizes the enterprise, it’s a place where artists “use delusional optimism and senselessness through performance and interactive works to sustain hope.”

The equation (delusions + senselessness = hope) is hardly new. Early modern artists were reporting to this territory a hundred years ago. You could certainly peg Marcel Duchamp’s absurd masterstroke, the urinal called “Fountain,” as a delusionally optimistic (and vice versa) stance.

“Hope-a-holic” is more nuanced. The bulls-eye trope in this lot, “Pinning Glasses,” is a pair of specs with long sharp screws poking out of the lenses, on the inside. Don these, and they’ll be the last thing you see.

Jinkee Choi, who made them, is in the same territory as Meret Oppenheim, whose fur-covered tea cup, saucer and spoon (1936) prompts the same awe/nausea as “Pinning Glasses.”

Nearby, Choi’s photograph “Unawoke Eggs” is an early morning composition which a young man’s tousled bed-head is a nest cuddling three eggs.

Simplicity counts. Tina La Porta’s odd watercolor, “Torn,” a thin, long drawing of a separation, a tear, a pinkish rip, isn’t very complicated. It’s so straight-up and well-drawn, it’s almost endearing.

Similarly, there’s the easy-to-miss”Fool,” a six-inch-long wall bracelet — made of glitter, Plexiglas and wire — in the foyer of one of the galleries. Is it a pronouncement flung at the viewer, a confession by the artist or a message from on high?

WARHOL & OPPENHEIM

The videos are excruciating — just what you expect — until you get the joke. And then they are bearable, at least for a while. Andy Warhol was making this sort of moving-picture statement 50 years ago, propping a camera in front of the Empire State Building, or training it on sleeping people for five or six hours at a stretch.

Daniel Behar’s “Betsey Ross Trilogy Pt. 1, Back to the Future” is an up-close view of two busy, deft hands deconstructing an American flag, stitch by stitch, star by appliquéd star. Crazy.

The five minutes of “The Painted Man,” a glittery lounge-lizard puppet who plays a Casio keyboard with his “feet,” seems like a lot more. In this piece, a portentous voice-over emits no end of bombast and platitudes.

What’s her target? Maybe it’s artists who find themselves and their ideas endlessly interesting? Or writers who think their every idea is platinum.

“Me As a Snail,” Mike Fagen’s nearly three-minute video costume drama, is sad, funny and stupid simultaneously. It “stars” a character dressed in an elaborate snail get-up. Snail-man keeps crossing the road (he’s in some sleepy downtown somewhere), not very safely and without looking both ways.

Of all the characters you’ll meet in “Hope-a-Holic,” which has a restorative sense of humor, he might be the one you identify with.